Welcome To Term Four

Welcome to Term Four Prep families! We hope you have had a lovely break over the holidays and you, and your children are ready for another wonderful term of learning. Please be aware that this term, all children are required to wear a hat for play.

Important dates to note for Prep families

Thursday 3rd November: Whole School Colour Fun Run (Reminder to create an online profile and donate)

Thursday 10th November and Friday 11th November: Hands on Science incursion (Further details to come, keep an eye on Compass for consent and payment).

Tuesday 13th December: 2023 Day (Meet your new teacher and classmates)

Wednesday 14th December: Reports (Live on Compass)

Thursday 15th December: Prep Prom (A celebration performance by Preps in completing their first year of school at GWPS).

Friday 16th December: Class Party

Tuesday 20th December: Last Day School will finish at 1:30pm

Reading

In Term Four, our reading focus will be on rhymes and procedural texts. We will delve deeper into building our comprehension and fluency skills through the CAFE reading approach. Through exploring rich mentor texts, the learners will be developing these skills by reflecting on the author’s meaning of the text through visualisation. To support comprehension, they will be experimenting with changing their voice noting punctuation and using emotions to influence intonation. Through the texts ‘Oi Frog!’, ‘Hairy Maclary’, English nursery rhymes and the author Dr Seuss they will deepen their understanding of rhythm and rhyme.

To support your child at home:

Play rhyming games with your child. For example, “I spy, something that rhymes with …”
When reading, encourage your child to pause at a full stop, change their voice for a question and exclamation mark and change their voice to show when a character is speaking.

Writing

In Term Four, learners will have the opportunity to revisit Narrative, as well as exploring Procedure and Poetry for the first time at school. Learners will develop strategies that support writing development in Poetry through the exploration of onset and rime and then creating their own rhyming couplets following the structure of texts shared in class. During our unit on Procedural writing, learners will be building their word knowledge. Transitional words such as ‘first, then, next’ will be applied to organise steps in instructions as well as incorporating action verbs to support their audience in understanding what to do.

To support your child with their writing, you can try these strategies:

Talk with your child about sequences in your actions. Example, making a sandwich.
Encourage your child to read their writing aloud. This will enable them to more easily pick up on and correct errors made.

Support your child to reflect on language learned throughout the year in their speaking and writing by asking what characters or objects in their writing look like, sound like, feel like or move like. The language we have used in class is ‘descriptive’ and ‘interesting’ words (adjectives and verbs)

Spelling

During Term Four, Prep learners will continue to focus on learning to spell personal words which will be part of their weekly spelling practice. This will continue to be sent home and completed as part of their home learning (also known as Look, Say, Name, Cover, Write Check or LSNCWC).

In class, learners will be building their sound/letter knowledge through the digraphs ‘ou, ow, oi, oy’ and revising the letter combinations used to make the long vowel sounds in words such as ‘a, ai, ay, a_e’. To support our units in reading and writing, they will be explicitly taught onset and rime and syllables, as well as investigating spelling rules of suffixes to change the meaning of words (adding –s, -ed, -ing).

To support your child at home:

Prompt them to practice LSNCWC daily with their Individual Spelling Words.
Encourage them to break words into syllables to assist with spelling.
Discuss the definition of unknown words that they read, to assist with comprehension of text and broaden their vocabulary.

Mathematics:

Throughout Term Four, the Prep learners will investigate a variety of Mathematical language. We begin this investigation through the language of chance. To help describe the likelihood of events they will be using the language “will happen”, “might happen”, “won’t happen”, “possible” and “impossible”. Further language will be introduced during our unit on time with o’clock times and times throughout the day. In mass and capacity, we will be using “full”, “half”, “empty”, “heavier”, “lighter”, “equal”, “more” and “less”, when comparing and measuring two objects using informal units. Towards the end of the term, we will begin to look at concepts in number including sharing and partitioning as well as revisiting addition and subtraction problems.

To support your child at home:

Continue to reinforce number concepts that have been learned, such as skip counting, part-part-whole, whole-part-part, adding and subtracting.
Talk about the clocks you have in your home and the important o’clock times you may have in your daily routine, such as 7 o’clock wake up, 8 o’clock bedtime.
Compare the mass and capacity of objects around the home using the language above.

Inquiry and You Can Do It!

This term, learners will be inquiring into the question “How can we use our senses to investigate our curiosities?” Following the science inquiry skills within the Victorian Curriculum, they will learn to use their five senses to predict, observe and record experiments on light and sound. This will be enhanced with an incursion from Hands on Science, where they will create instruments that make sound. With their newfound knowledge, learners will explore how the use of light and sound can be transferred into enhancing dance performances through their Prep Prom. The learners will also unpack aspects of ethical capabilities by exploring the concept of right and wrong, and how our choices can impact the world around us. Through purposeful collaborative opportunities, they will build their skills in making positive choices to develop an understanding of empathy and how they have an active role when working with others.

At home you can enhance your child’s learning by:

Investigate household items that create light and sound and record observations through the five senses.
Encourage your child to explore their curiosities and make predictions (generating a hypothesis).
Discuss what choices they could make in a given situation and imagine what impact these different choices may have on themselves and others.